Developers are more than 14% or 20% of the salaries paid out. They are not being laid off at a rate that's consummate with their monetary cost

Yes, I detect the same sentiment (and it seems like a pretty natural one given the general audience here), but it also seems useful to see some data regarding the situation.

I wonder what proportion of new pandemic hires were also software engineers.

I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me that during the pandemic, many companies over-hired software devs, and this round of right-sizing is correcting that mistake.

This data is still compatible with the statement “most of the layoffs are not software developers”, most likely is they are being layed off at a similar rate to everyone else and “software developer” is simply the modal role at a tech company. What other category of employee do you have that many of?

Sales, generally. Sales scales with n clients whereas software should scale with like n log n or sqrt.